What Xenos said. (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, May 12, 2016, 12:21 (2914 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I played and loved both of the new Tomb Raider games. Rise of the Tomb Raider is especially good.

I feel like Tomb Raider is a better "game" than Uncharted, in that the gun play, stealth mechanics, crafting mechanics, and large explorable hub areas all work really well together to create an engaging gameplay loop. The story doesn't really factor into it at a certain point. I loved Rise of the Tomb Raider, yet I've already forgotten large parts of that story. The characters aren't all that interesting, and I certainly don't care about them like I do the characters from Uncharted.

Uncharted 4 seems like it's structured largely like the rest of the Uncharted games. It's much more linear than Rise of the Tomb Raider, which each Chapter just being another linear level to traverse. The gunplay and stealth are good, but not really in the same league as Tomb Raider's. Uncharted definitely relies heavily on you actually caring about the story and characters to pull you along, and lets you experience cool set pieces, but doesn't actually throw you into the world in the way that Rise of the Tomb Raider did.

Ultimately, as much as people want to compare them, I don't think it's all that warranted. They're completely different styles of games, even if they look very similar on the surface. I'm not sure I can say one is better than the other--I love them both for very different reasons.

Part of me was hoping that Uncharted 4 would mimic and have an answer for Rise of the Tomb Raider's semi-open world design. Part of me is a bit disappointed we didn't get that. The other part of me is happy we didn't--I feared that Naughty Dog making something like that might dilute the good qualities of Uncharted.

Tomb Raider's collectibles are definitely much better, because at least they give a little bit of context. Uncharted's collectibles are literally finding the items with absolutely no indication of what they are. Which, I guess is fine--it makes me feel alright just completely ignoring them.

Perhaps it's because of all the time I spend in Destiny, but these days I seriously crave being immersed in a well-crafted, linear story. I know that in gaming linear is a bad word now, and it's considered regressive if you can't affect the outcome, but games that do a good job of having multiple endings are rare (Dishonored is one), and even then having one logical, inevitable ending is always more satisfying, to me anyway.